I now have a working Linux installation on my laptop. Honestly, I doubted I’d ever be here again.
I quit my sysadmin job a little over 10 years ago to pursue a non-technical career (law school, now lawyer), and I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth to keep up with all the changes being made in the Linux world: systemd, wayland, the rise of docker and containerization, etc. Eventually, by 2015, I basically gave up on Linux as my daily driver. Still, when I bought a new laptop in 2019, I made sure to pick the Macbook with the best Linux hardware support at the time (the 2017 13" Macbook Pro without the touchbar or any kind of security chip, aka the 14,1). Just in case I ever wanted to give Linux a try again.
When the reddit API/mod controversy was brewing this summer, I switched over to lemmy as my primary “forum,” and subscribed to a bunch of communities. And because lemmy/kbin seemed to attract a lot of more tech-minded, and a little bit more anti-authoritarian/anti-corporate folks, the discussions in the threads started to normalize the regular use of Linux and other free/open source software as a daily driver.
So this week, I put together everything I needed to dual boot Linux and MacOS: boot/installation media for both MacOS and Linux, documentation specific to my Apple hardware, as well as the things that have changed since my last Linux laptop (EFI versus BIOS, systemd-boot versus grub2, iwd versus wpa-supplicant, Wayland versus X, etc.). I made a few mistakes along the way, but I managed to learn from them, fix a few misconfigured things, and now have a working Linux system!
I still have a bunch of things to fix on my to-do list: sound doesn’t work (but there’s a script that purports to fix that), suspend doesn’t work (well, more accurately, I can’t come back from suspend), text/icon size and scaling aren’t 100% consistent on this high DPI screen, network discovery stuff doesn’t work (I think I need to install zeroconf but I don’t know what it is and intend to understand it before I actually install and configure it), I’d like a pretty bootloader splash screen, still have to configure bash (or another shell? do people still use bash?) the way I like it.
But my system works. I have a desktop environment with a working trackpad (including haptic feedback), hardware keys for volume (never mind sound doesn’t actually work yet), screen brightness, and keyboard backlight brightness. I have networking. The battery life seems to be OK. Once I get comfortable with this as a daily driver, I might remove MacOS and dive right into a single OS on this device.
So thank you! Y’all are the best.
You were a sysadmin then became an attorney? How do you have any faith in humanity left?
It’s kinda liberating to peek under the hood and confirm that society, like the internet, is mostly held together with figurative duct tape, that someone put there as a temporary fix that became semi-permanent. The concept of technical debt for software and technology projects exists everywhere, including in the backlogs of what our government agencies, court systems, and corporate organizations are doing (and what they simply haven’t done yet).
But the whole thing is still pretty resilient. The individuals who make the decisions that feed into the unimaginably complex web of interdependent relationships and rules might not actually understand every detail, and mostly aren’t even benevolent actors who want the best for everyone, but the system as a whole still trudges along, mostly making life better than if the system didn’t exist at all. And once you learn how at least some parts of it work, you can make some changes here and there for the better, either for yourself or for the people/issues you care about or for the entirety of the system.
As someone who didn’t make it into law school, and didn’t keep trying partly because people who knew me well figured I’d likely have a stroke from rage as an attorney, I appreciate your wholesome and optimistic outlook you’ve carried into the career. Keep fighting the good fight!
Thanks! I found that this brand of optimism was a nice counterweight to my belief that people are just generally fundamentally flawed (and often irredeemably so). But the same is true of computer systems and technology, and I realized that I can love things (technology, TV shows, books, music, websites, cities, foods) while acknowledging their shortcomings, so I can do the same for people and institutions made out of people. Once I abandoned the idea that I could only like things that were perfect (or even good), and decoupled my perception of whether something was good with whether I liked it or not, it really helped me with my outlook towards people and physical things and intangible concepts.
You’re implying they have any. Faith isn’t a requirement nowadays
Congrats! I would love to go a bit geeky again one day and have a Linux OS running on my Mac. But since I have an M1 it means asahi Linux which seems to still be in its infancy (wish them all the best!)
Quite a coincidence that, Asahi just today announced Fedora Asahi Remix
They are planning an official release on end of Aug, and plans to maintain it too as an upstream-first manner
Yes I noticed this when I checked up on it after I posted. Guess I’ll have to give it a go end of august, I’m excited :D
I’m right there with you. The reddit thing has pushed me over the tipping point. I wiped Windows from my gaming PC and installed Linux Mint. I also am testing out /e/os on my phone.
Welcome back! I dabbled here and there with linux, but never got fully on board until a year or two ago.
Started by dual booting Manjaro, but had some issues with it. Moved to Arch (btw), and now my kids have the dual boot system and my daily driver is a pre-owned Thinkpad with no windows partition.
Your project would be a reach for me. Linux as as daily driver is pretty easy if you don’t dial boot and don’t use Apple hardware. I have Ubuntu on an Intel NUC and everything works just fine. Sound, camera, printer, graphics. Haha. You’re going to scare the lazy.
That’s great that hardware support for Windows-oriented laptops has made the progress it has!
The reason why I basically quit Linux in 2015 was because my hardware lost support from nvidia’s proprietary driver, and I never could get nouveau or the others to play friendly. That’s on top of the fact I never got bluetooth or the webcam to work (not that I ever intended to use those), and the proprietary Broadcom wifi driver didn’t seem to work as well as Windows. And the CPU/thermal management was atrocious, with progressively worse battery life over time. So I gave it up.
So my experience with a 2017 model of Macbook, using 2023 versions of all the firmware/software, is actually better than where I was in 2015 with a Dell laptop that literally shipped with preinstalled Linux in 2010. I think all I need to do is get past the initial setup of the non-standard or quirky hardware, and I’ll be in a better place with this laptop today than I was with my laptop in 2015.
If the typical off the shelf laptop available today is a one click installation with the typical beginner-friendly liveUSB installer, that’s great. It certainly wasn’t true in 2006 when I first switched, and wasn’t true in 2015 when I gave it up.
if you took non-friendly hardware, don’t expect magic. ok, the macbooks up to 2012 were quite hacker friendly but thinkpads are really the to-go laptop for a perfect Linux experience. nowadays, we have more variety: system76, framework, etc…
The Asahi Linux project would like a word…
I think they would actually confirm that Apple is not Linux-friendly. ;)
It’s an awesome project, though!
Yeah that’s fair. I mostly meant it as a joke. But I dunno, I think the beauty of Linux is that it’ll run on just about anything. I use iSH a lot on my iPad, and it’s basically a containerised Alpine linux terminal. My favourite way to SSH from it.
call me when you will have:
- Asahi could provide the same phenomenal power management (consumption, standby/wakeup,…)
- 2D/3D/Video acceleration
- thunderbolt 4
- WiFi AC (not AX as this one is not yet really supported on linux anyway)
until then, yeah, it’s cool what the team behind Asahi but I prefer to use my laptop in its full capacity on linux today and for that, ThinkPad and XPS fill the bill, for the premium league i mean, naturally, you will likely to be able to use any laptop without too much pain, ok, maybe not those dual GPUs.
Thanks to all alternative products based on free and open internet community contributers.
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Welcome!
Congrats!
Enjoy the freedom and don’t be afraid to ask for help. In time, you will see yourself helping others and contributing to the community.
I have been feeling the same! It’s so hard to justify leaving macos though when it’s Unix already, so I have another old laptop I tinker with Linux on (plus a homelab)
